Murder at the Racetrack (32 page)

“But maybe I won’t win,” the girl added, so nervous about her lies that she felt sweat running down her T-shirt under the
red Campbell Farms jacket. “Mr. Grandors doesn’t want me to win and Mr. Jones doesn’t think I can.”

Bits lit a cigarette. “Yeah, Raylan told me tonight how you were a real long shot.” She blew a ragged smoke ring at the dirty
ceiling. “So, baby, you going to lose? Or you going to show them? Excuse me.” Her mother went over to wait on Eric Grandors,
who waved at Michelle from the end of the bar.

•    •    •

Loopy was right that it would rain that afternoon at Keeneland. It was a soft steady rain, and at post time for the Bluegrass
Stakes, the track was muddy.

The big crowd cheered as the last horse, Number 14, Fortune’s Child, danced into the starting gate.

Bits Harlin held her binoculars tight to her eyes, never taking them from the red number fourteen and the red-and-white clocks
of her daughter’s satin shirt.

Michelle and Raindancer broke fast and headed inside, catching Windsong by the far turn. To the astonishment of the announcer,
Raindancer ran the first quarter mile in twenty-one and three-fifths seconds.

At the half-mile, Raindancer was still right beside Wind-song, challenging him to keep up. Windsong couldn’t do it.

In the stretch, in the soft rain, in the crowded splatter of mud, Raindancer took the lead.

Michelle felt the gray pulling away from the pack, carrying her with him until there was no mud around them, no noise, only
the misty finish line ahead. But then she heard something. And she looked back.

What she saw was Spats coming closer. He wouldn’t go away.

Spats brushed past Raindancer, so close that Michelle could feel the leather boot of the champion’s jockey. Spats was taking
the lead from them. They were only a dozen lengths from the wire. Spats’s lead was widening. For one terrible second, doubt
rushed through Michelle. They were going to lose. Mud from Spats’s hooves splattered on her goggles so she couldn’t see; Raindancer
faltered as her stick fell from her hand and, losing control, she grabbed at the gray’s mane.

She said to him, “Raindancer.”

It felt like a moment last summer when Eric Grandors had taken Loopy and her for a motorboat ride on a lake. At a thrust of
the throttles, the boat’s large engines had lifted them with sudden speed almost out of the water. She felt the horse gather
himself beneath her like that, as if he could leave earth behind. She said again, “Raindancer.”

The gray caught up with Spats, they raced side by side for an instant, than Spats faded, faded to nothing. There was no one
in the world but Raindancer and Michelle at the finish line and the far distant cry of her mother’s voice.

Fortune’s Child paid fifty-to-one. The odds had dropped at the last minute when, just before the race, at six-oh-five p.m.,
Bits Harlin placed the last of her bets to win on Number 14.

Bits collected, before taxes, $540,000. Loopy Rojas darted in and out of the crowd near her as she moved from window to window
collecting the money in cash, filling out W2-G forms for the biggest bets. As she left each window, Bits put the money in
Michelle’s knapsack. Loopy pushed in beside her, leading her to the crowded bar area, taking the money, cramming it in an
old duffel bag. But turning around after collecting on her last winning ticket, Bits Harlin couldn’t find the groom. She stood
there waiting for him, holding seventy-two thousand dollars, the payout on a two-thousand-dollar bet at fifty-to-one, minus
the twenty-eight percent deducted then and there for federal taxes.

In the winner’s circle, Michelle, muddy-faced, smiled for the cameras. A reporter asked her, “How do you feel?” She shook
her head, not wanting to talk. “No,” the reporter insisted. “How do you feel, winning this race?”

“… My horse won the race.”

Raindancer pushed his nose at Mr. Jones, as if to say, “I knew I could, too.”

Mr. Grandors was red-faced, glaring up at Michelle on the horse, except as the cameras clicked, when he hugged his young handsome
wife and tried to look happy. Grinning, his son, Eric, reached out to clasp his hand around the ankle of Michelle’s boot.
“One-forty-six-point-seventy! Unbelievable!”

Jones bent over, felt the gray stallion’s fetlock. “You got a bruise here,” he told the horse. But he said nothing to Michelle.

That night, when she looked for Loopy at Campbell Farms, the groom was nowhere to be found; the shelf empty where his hotplate
and TV had once sat. When she called his cell phone, no one answered.

At midnight Michelle took $10,800 of the money her mother had collected to Mr. Jones’s office, thinking that she would just
leave the cash without explanation on his desk. But she found the trainer standing quietly in the dusky room, waiting for
her.

He told her what the official bonus would have been for her as winner. For him as trainer. For Loopy as groom. Loopy wouldn’t
be getting his bonus though. Loopy was doubtless on his way home to Costa Rica. “Right before the race,” he added, “I fired
him.”

“Because of this?” She handed the trainer the bound stack of hundred-dollar bills.

“Because of this.” Mr. Jones showed her a small vial of a drug called Dormosedan that he’d taken from Loopy. It was a powerful
tranquilizer, and two cc’s of it would drop a horse to the ground. Much less of a dose could slow down a favorite, a closer
like the big roan champion Spats, just long enough for a long shot like Fortune’s Child to win. Losers in a horse race weren’t
urine tested. If Loopy drugged Spats, who would ever know?

Michelle felt sick to her heart.

The trainer and the jockey sat there in silence a long while. Finally she couldn’t bear it anymore. “What are you going to
do?” She pointed at the bound stacks of bills on his desk.

Jones scratched at his grizzled mustache. “Teach you a lesson,” he said in his quiet voice and then turned away from her.

Michelle left the office. In Raindancer’s stall, she sat on the straw in the dark, quiet, listening to the steady breathing
of the gray horse. So they hadn’t won. Spats was drugged. Rain-dancer and she hadn’t done the splendid thing after all. True,
maybe her mother could now make a down payment on a house that couldn’t be moved, but that happiness wouldn’t happen because
Michelle had won it for her. No, Loopy had hedged his bets, had cheated and slowed down Spats with a drug. And Mr. Jones had
caught him cheating. It was true: Cheating only cheated the cheaters. Loopy had cheated them all.

“I’m sorry,” she told the gray horse.

Raindancer whinnied at the noise of someone walking toward them. She heard a knock at the stall door. Then a light came on
in the corridor and Mr. Jones stood there. “Michelle, come on back to my office.” He walked away.

In his office, Jones held out to her a small folded bundle of money. “Five hundred dollars,” he said. “That’s what I won.
Because ten dollars was all I could bet. On Raindancer. Somebody had robbed me.”

She said, “I’m sorry.” Then, “You bet on Raindancer? You put in your bet before you found Loopy with that tranquilizer?”

He shook his head. “No. I put in my bet afterwards.”

The trainer took the vial of tranquilizer from his pocket and handed it to her. The seal on the bottle wasn’t broken. Jones
said, “Loopy would have used this. But he didn’t. I stopped him.”

She stared at the tall thin black man. “Spats wasn’t drugged?”

“No, he was not.”

“And you bet on Raindancer?”

“Well,” he said, “you made me a believer. But running that track in one-forty-six?” He whistled softly. “Young lady, that
took my breath away.”

“So winning was all right?”

He shook his head. “Winning wasn’t your job. Your job was to take out Windsong.”

“But I did that, too.”

“Yes, you did.” Jones held up a framed photograph, the same newspaper clipping Eric Grandors had given her. The trainer stood
on a chair and placed the picture on a hook already set in his wall, below but not far from his photo of Secretariat. “Eric
gave me this picture.” Stepping down carefully, he nodded at her with a regard she’d never before seen in his lined, freckled
face.

She smiled back at him. “So Raindancer’s not only a morning glory?”

Mr. Jones just held open his office door for her to walk through it. He said, “I’ll see you tomorrow at five. Go get some
sleep.” As they moved into the corridor, Eric Grandors stepped toward them.

“Michelle, you want a ride home?”

“Sure.” She shrugged at the young man.

“Tomorrow at five,” Jones called after her.

She waved her arm without looking back.

The trainer leaned into Raindancer’s stall. “There she goes, Champ.”

Michele Martinez

L
isa Rivera had about twenty minutes left on her shift when the guy walked in and took a seat in a corner booth. She could
tell from the way he moved that he was in a hurry, and from his expensive haircut and pinstriped suit that he had money in
his pocket, so she brought him ice water and a menu ASAP. She could always spot a high roller, and win or lose they were generous
tippers. Especially if she gave them reason to be.

“Specials are on the board. Something to drink?” She smiled just enough to show off her full lips. Lisa had been playing the
same game in one form or another since she was twelve years old, and she had the moves down.

“Coffee. Black.” He glanced at the menu but didn’t bother to open it. “What can you do fast?”

“How long you got?”

He looked at his watch, and so did she. It was a gold Rolex with a diamond bezel, flashy for a man, expensive. “Twenty minutes,
max.”

“Yeah? Me too. Before my shift ends, I mean.” Lisa’s tone was casual, not at all suggestive, but her comment was meant to
test the waters. The guy didn’t bite. He just looked back at her, waiting for an answer. “It’s not real crowded right now,
so say five minutes for a sandwich. If you want a burger, maybe a little longer,” she said.

“Make it a cheeseburger. Deluxe.”

“That’ll take around ten.”

“No problem. I’m a fast eater.” The guy smiled as if this were funny, so Lisa smiled back. He had white teeth and eyes so
dark brown that they were almost black. He was good looking in an average sort of way, late forties she guessed, with curly
hair, graying and cut short. lisa held his gaze for an extra beat.

“American, swiss or cheddar?” She glanced down at his hands as she spoke. A wedding ring. That was always good, for her purposes.
And manicured nails. This guy must have mad cash.

“American.”

She brought the slip back to the kitchen and leaned across the open stainless steel counter. “Hey, Earl, do me a favor. Move
this to the front of the line. Customer’s in a hurry.”

“You see a crowd out there? Lunch is through, ain’t no line.”

“So move it faster, then. I wanna make him happy.” And she pulled her lip gloss out of her apron pocket and slicked the wand
over her lips, using the metal napkin holder on the counter for a mirror.

Earl leaned out as far as his big stomach would allow, craning his neck. “Over there in the suit?”

“That’s him.”

“You got yourself a live one, girl.”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Be good, now.”

“You
be good. Cook the food and mind your own business,” she said, and blew him an exaggerated kiss.

Earl chuckled as he turned away, making his belly jiggle, lisa watched him pick a wan-looking patty off a pile by its square
of bloodied paper and slap it down onto the grill. It sizzled, sending up a lick of flame.

She walked back over to the guy, balancing a mug of black coffee and squeeze botdes of ketchup and mustard on a wet plastic
tray. He’d been in the middle of a conversation, but he hung up as she approached and slipped his cell phone back into his
jacket pocket. Lisa placed the items down before him one by one, leaning over just far enough to give him a flash of cleavage
if he cared to look, but not so much that she was shoving her tits in his face. With this one, her instincts said to go slow.

She straightened up and hit him with the look she reserved for the hard cases—nonchalant and yet completely sexual at the
same time—and made her voice match her expression. “Can I get you something else?”

She had his attention finally.
Damn,
she was good. She should patent that thing.

“Lisa,”
he said slowly, reading her name tag. She leaned back on her heel, hand on her hip, and let him take a good look. “What about
a horse?” he asked. “You got a horse for me today, Lisa?”

“Sure. Hell’s Bells to place in the fifth.”

“Yeah? Huh.” He looked impressed. “Who says?”

“A guy named Sallie who comes in every day for lunch. Real track rat. Once in a while, I let him play my tip money for me.”

“And? Does he win?”

She shrugged. “Mostly. I lost a few times. But one time I hit on long odds and made three hundred bucks off a two-dollar bet.”

“Very impressive. Hell’s Bells. Okay, I’ll remember.”

“But you better hurry up. Post time was one, you know.”

He was still looking at her, which she took to mean that he didn’t mind if she stayed a minute.

“So you play the ponies much? Because I never seen you in here before,” she asked idly.

“I work for a living. Can’t just spend all day at the track.” He was clearly educated, but as he talked, lisa heard the New
Yawk in his voice. Or the Brooklyn, to be more accurate.

“Let me guess. You’re, what… a stockbroker?”

“Nope. Lawyer.”

“Really? We don’t get too many lawyers in here. They don’t seem to like the horses.”

He smiled, those white teeth again. He must’ve had them done. “We’re a cautious bunch of bastards. You could even say boring.”

“But not you,” she said, widening her doe eyes in faux admiration. As he leaned back against the leatherette of the booth,
his gaze lingered on her body. She had him going now.

“Oh, yeah, I’m boring, too. I work all the time, just like the rest of ’em.”